The Warsaw Anagrams

(Overlook Press; 323 pages; $25.95)

Author Richard Zimler has been deservedly called "an American Umberto Eco," and has his own high standards to live up to. With his latest novel, "The Warsaw Anagrams," he not only reaches those heights but thoroughly surpasses them. Equal parts riveting, heartbreaking, inspiring and intelligent, this mystery set in the most infamous Jewish ghetto of World War II deserves a place among the most important works of Holocaust literature.

The core of this novel focuses on the protagonist's seemingly preposterous commitment to unravel the cause of a single death - that of his beloved nephew Adam - amid the daily numberless murders taking place within Nazi-ruled Eastern Europe. This singular pursuit of truth and justice, so disproportionate to the context of the Warsaw Ghetto, serves as a kind of rebuttal to the genocide, with its anonymous millions of victims. "We owe uniqueness to our dead at the very least," explains Erik Cohen, the book's narrator.

Proof of Zimler's prodigious gifts of sensitivity, complexity and verisimilitude can be found in the way that we root for the survival of a narrator we know from the outset is already dead. (A ghostly visitor returning to the "scene of the crime," he is telling his story to someone who will indeed live to record it.) Such is the power of this voice's intimacy and purpose to insist on being listened to. In addressing his friend Heniek, he speaks to the readers, imploring us not to turn away but to pay close attention moment by moment.

Erik Cohen's previous life as a psychiatrist gives him an all-too-clear understanding of the darkness of the human soul. Yet in the face of brutality and meaningless slaughter, there are dazzling instances of humanity, love, empathy and self-sacrifice. In this novel, as in nonfiction reports from the Holocaust, truly the best and the worst of the human condition are visible, side by side: the ability to imagine and to obliterate, to torture and to resuscitate.

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It could be said that Zimler specializes in such "framed" narratives; his previous books have employed the device of a discovered secret text, and are similarly endowed with mystical elements (e.g. "The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon," a novel that earned him prizes and a wide European readership).

"The Warsaw Anagrams" will surely appeal to readers compelled by murder mysteries, readers intrigued by history and World War II atrocities, readers attracted to literary fiction rich in nuanced philosophical examinations of the human psyche. As someone personally haunted by my own family's ghosts of the Holocaust, I was especially moved by the central metaphor of the novel. Puzzles, word play, codes and tricks serve as a metaphor for all the permutations of self that might be required to survive such degradations and deprivations, suitable for a work of fiction that in many ways borrows its clothing from actual Warsaw Ghetto diaries.

"Sometimes we need to wait a long time to know the meaning of what's happening right at this very second," says Heniek, the survivor who lives to tell the story. Although the Warsaw Ghetto is perhaps best known for its desperately heroic uprising, this novel focuses on 1940 and 1941, after what the characters refer to as the "Before Time," and with subtle yet ominous foreshadowing of the exterminations yet to come.

Referring to the ghetto as "our island," the desperate residents are anything but romantic in their self-awareness. This is a barely restrained ironic designation for their daily if not hourly experience of alienation and exile; the water is the rest of the Polish city that surrounds them, going about its business even as Jewish children's mutilated bodies turn up, tangled in barbed-wire fencing. Sadism is almost a form of contagion here; despicable criminal motives are seen to underlie rationalized acts of self-preservation.

Even as the accumulation of clues and cul-de-sacs leads the reader toward and away from discovering the identity of the murderer, the novel's momentum never veers too far from the agonizing labyrinth of life in the ghetto. Smuggling and blackmail are as much a part of ordinary reality as one might expect to find in any ghetto, along with malnutrition and orphaned children. "Murder of innocents" could have easily been overshadowed by the vast scale of the Nazi occupation, but Zimler keeps his attention on one emblematic pocket of Warsaw, including the particular brutality of Nazi collaboration among both non-Jewish Poles and Jewish traitors. Adam's murder may be "solved," but that hardly brings us a happy ending.

Yet astonishing moments of humor are here, as are glimpses of the defiant human capacity not merely to endure in the flesh but also to bear witness. This may well be the most empowering of motivations to survive at all costs, the most bittersweet of triumphs.